Armour of William Somerset, used for the figure of Huntingdon from 1827. (II.83)

Samuel Meyrick and the Rearrangement of the Horse Armoury, about 1824-1827

Description

Samuel Meyrick’s involvement with the Tower Armouries has normally been seen as beginning in 1826. However, in 1821 Meyrick, the foremost authority of the day on arms and armour, wrote a long letter to the Duke of Wellington in which he made a series of observations about the current state of the ancient armour at the Tower. Meyrick asserted that the ancient armour on display at the Tower was ‘so notorious as to be the subject of ridicule’. Yet many early nineteenth-century visitors were still clearly impressed by what they saw. Only sixteen years earlier, in 1805, the American university professor, Benjamin Silliman commented that ‘This collection of ancient armour is very interesting, and although it was extremely gratifying to my curiosity, I felt it to be still more important as illustrating history.’ Yet it was precisely these mistaken impressions that had prompted Meyrick to advocate the improvement of the collection for ‘the purposes of the Government, the historian and the artist, and to afford the public an instructive and pleasing gratification in contemplating the skill and ingenuity of remote periods.’

At the time of his 1821 proposals Meyrick was already corresponding with Ordnance officials. In A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour, published in 1824, he could not resist referring to his 1821 report. The Board, however, would not be pushed into supporting Meyrick’s cause. It was not until the summer of 1826 that his offer to rearrange the arms and armour in the Tower was formally accepted. On 23 June the Principal Storekeeper, Mark Singleton, wrote to Wellington advising him that following the completion of the new building the rearrangement could begin, and that Meyrick should be appointed to undertake the arrangement because there ‘is not any person in the Department, nor probably out of it, so well qualified, by extensive antiquarian research and long acquaintance with the subject of Ancient Armour, to superintend this arrangement as Dr Meyrick.’

Meyrick had certainly considered the nature and formation of the current line at some length. When writing his ‘Critical Inquiry’ of 1824 he attributed the formation of the line in 1660 to the desire to promote the restored monarchy. Moreover, he clearly favoured the end of Charles II’s reign as the moment when the monarchy actively developed the Line as a piece of political propaganda.

Meyrick certainly liked to think that he had been approached by Wellington to undertake this commission. In March 1827 he informed the Society of Antiquaries that the Master-General and Board had been pleased to ‘confide to my direction’ the rearrangement. Nevertheless, contemporary documents suggest that the Principal Storekeeper’s Department had already begun taking steps internally to improve the collection. In March 1825 Robert Porrett, Clerk to the Principal Storekeeper had reported on the ‘state of progressive deterioration’ of the collections and had been discussing conservation measures with George Lovell, the Superintendant of the Small Armoury Department. It was only after internal discussions that Meyrick’s expertise was then sought.

Whatever the circumstances that led to Meyrick’s appointment his rearrangement of 1826-7 marked a new turning point in the development of the Horse Armoury and the equestrian displays. Meyrick wrote with pride in March 1827 of the improvements he had made. The newly displayed line caused considerable comment in newspapers and learned publications. In early 1829 The London Magazine carried a satirical report which regretted the creation of a more historically accurate line. Meyrick of course defended his arrangement of the collections and also took pains to distance himself from the existing arrangement of the Spanish Armoury, the nature of the New Horse Armoury (the building of which was supervised by Mr Wright of the clerk of the works), and the state of the displays as they existed in 1829, commenting that ‘on a recent visit to the new armoury, I was sorry to observe that, for want of the timely aid of a bit of wire behind, the riders are all falling forward.’ Nevertheless, with the completion of Meyrick’s rearrangement of the New Horse Armoury the displays remained largely untouched until the further reorganisation begun by James Robertson Planché in the early months of 1869.